9
Tonga
Early next morning, the Morning Light crept up on an island, a high green hill humped up out of the ocean. Beyond it they could see larger land, misted to grey in the early morning air.
Through the morning they rounded the point of the first island, which Mr. Wright told them was ‘Eua. They were not stopping there, but made for Tongatapu, the largest island of the archipelago of Tonga. The map in the saloon called it TONGA or FRIENDLY Is. Mr. Brimner, who had read up in readiness for his post, said that was because Captain Cook had found the people willing to trade and kinder than other islanders, whose first instinct had been to kill the interlopers. And perhaps that would have been a better idea, for Mr. Wright said many islanders had died of diseases brought by Europeans, before they gained resistance to new germs. Like tuberculosis, in the West.
It was a soft, murky sea around these islands. Near Tongatapu the water lay quiet, variegated from blue-green to brownish in patches, from some vegetation on the sea floor. The main town crouched on a slight rise: scattered white buildings around a larger official mass, also white. Yet everything was a little greyish, and dirty too. A fitful wind blew across the deck.
“The draft is shallow,” Francis said, coming to sit for a luncheon on deck, in honour of the gentle weather. “Here at Nuku‘alofa we will not dock at the wharf, but anchor well out and take the tender in as we need.”
That was a strange, unaccustomed name for a town. Kay said it under her breath to get it right. Nuku‘alofa, Nuku‘alofa.
Across the water she could now distinguish a large white building, a pepper-pot red roof on a stubby white tower; next to that, a church. A double avenue of low, feathery trees hid the buildings from full sight, but there looked to be lawn there, and park grounds along the waterfront.
Near shore in the shallows, submerged to their chests, dark-haired people moved along a line of basket weirs, threading something through the water and peering down to run hands along. Eels? Kay hoped not eels, for she had a horror of them.
“They soak the fibres for their mats, ta’ovala, their waist-wraps,” Seaton said from the lifeboat above her. “The women soak them in salt water for days or weeks, and come to check to see how pliable they are for weaving. I had a mat, long ago…My grandmother’s father’s ta’ovala putu, that I wore to her funeral.”
Was this where Seaton was from, then? His strong hawk nose lifted into the air, seeking, as if this land would have a different smell. Kay breathed in too, but could detect no special flavour.
Mr. Brimner dawdled in the companionway as if unwilling to go up on deck, his dark spectacles flashing in a subdued way. “I hope you will all come to tea with Mr. Hill, if invited?” he asked earnestly. Perhaps he was a little anxious.
Thea said, “Of course!” and turned back to her cabin for gloves.
For the heat of the day she also brought a sunshade. Kay did not want to stay in its irksome shade, and was told she would soon have a headache, and warned not to muss her good white muslin dress, laundered to a turn by Jiacheng. “The laundry is not suffering the lack of the Hubbards, at least,” Thea said. “That is good luck, or I should say God’s hand, although why God would use your foot in Lena Hubbard’s bottom end as His instrument I really cannot tell.”
A soft giggle rose in her throat. Kay had not heard her laugh in ages.
The tender tied up at a long wharf, with steps cut up one side. Kay’s spindly arms were elastic enough to haul her up a ladder quickly, and she had no fear of her good boots slipping through rusty rungs, but stairs were quicker, and meant Thea would not have to spoil her best white lawn on a ladder climb.
First at the top, Kay looked about her, inspecting it for Mr. Brimner’s sake. Rubbishy kind of place, and hot in this late September afternoon.
A gaggle of ragged young men loitered at the pier head, sitting for hire in brakes and open carts, none in good repair and some showing the road right through their floorboards. It was all a bit fly-blown and deserted, for the main town of a place.
Then along came bowling a neater carriage, an open trap with a white horse pulling it. A clerical gentleman, small and dark, sprang out and came toward them, taking hands one at a time as if this was Sunday morning after church, his mouth making a polite pink triangle. He greeted Thea first, and Francis, and then found Mr. Brimner again and pumped his hands together over and over.
“We had your telegram!” he cried, seeming more excited than was fitting. He turned to bow to Kay, lifting his old-fashioned hat. “And this young miss?”
She was prepared to dislike him, or anyone else who stole Mr. Brimner away. With a very slight pressure Mr. Brimner put an arm along her shoulder and said, “May I present the Reverend Mr. Hill, incumbent here in Nuku‘alofa town. He is an old college mate of mine at Caius, and one of the reasons I entered the mission.”
She yielded, since he wished it. “How do you do, Sir,” she said. At least polite.
Bowing correctly, Mr. Brimner turned to Mr. Hill. “Let me introduce Miss Kay Ward, younger sister of Captain Grant’s wife. An apt pupil of classical tongues,” he said, giving her a dignified collegial nod, “and a sound maritime companion.”
“Capital, capital! Do all of you come along. Mrs. Hill has got a luncheon ready, with tea as good as one may obtain on this benighted isle.”
Francis took himself back to the ship, but the others climbed up into the trap and found a handhold as Mr. Hill shook up the reins and shouted at his poor thin horse. They wheeled off over dirt roads that soon yielded to grass tracks, a little crowded with a quiet jostling of traffic in the town. As they went, Mr. Hill pointed at a number of buildings, which all turned out to be churches.
Not far from the wharf, a dog darted across the street before them, heavy dugs swinging below a starved-looking belly, and was caught—a terrible sound!—by the wheels of a heavy cart going the opposite way. The dog rolled and shook herself, whimpering, and limped off into an alley.
Kay had left Pilot in Jacky Judge’s charge. She looked down the alley, but the dog had vanished. Perhaps it would live.
Leaving the crowded market area, they turned corners very confusingly along empty, dusty alleys lined with whitewashed walls and scrap-wood fences in front of little ramshackle houses, and after some time pulled into a short gravel drive before a yellow bungalow with a roof of thatched straw. A woman waited on the porch, fair-haired and tired-looking.
Mr. Hill announced, with endearing pride in this nondescript lady, “My wife!”
“We are hoping you will stay to tea,” Mrs. Hill began, as they climbed down from the cart. “And maybe take a walk with us this afternoon, before Evensong…” Her voice was light and hesitant. A girl and a small boy clung to her sagging yellowed-muslin skirts, the boy peeping round and hiding his face again. He had pretty gold curls like bedsprings. The girl’s duller flaxen hair was pulled into taut triangles by braids at her temples.
Mr. Hill handed them down from the cart, stopping to display his imported British flowers (“Carefully packed, and of course hand-watered in this climate, shoots do survive!”), and ushered them in, all the bodies bustling round in a swirling of people and steps and light and shade.
Kay stood still in the quiet garden, in the greyish-white light of Tonga, staring at palm-frond leaves and a ragged rooster ranging in the yard, and the horse still harnessed to the cart. In a foreign place.
Mrs. Hill had brought out her wedding china. “Only coconut cake,” she apologized, setting down small, thick cakes arrayed on a platter of flow blue undoubtedly crated with them from England. Understanding the honour paid her, Thea said they looked delicious.
Mr. Hill had gone into full clerical spate, informing Mr. Brimner of things he likely already knew: “Our small Anglican congregation in Tonga originated as a breakaway from Methodism. We might perhaps characterize our flock as Anglophile—it was at first named for Queen Victoria!” Mr. Hill chuckled at that. He amused himself too easily, Thea considered.
Mr. Brimner sat quietly taking in the house: the open expanse of bare oilclothed floor, two chintz-draped chairs, a short row of books in rough shelves below the front window.
“By the grace of Bishop Willis, our church has been attached to the new diocese under the higher jurisdiction of New Zealand,” said Mr. Hill. “We have a gentleman’s agreement, you know, not to seek converts from among those already baptized by the Methodists or the London Missionary Society, and we do respect that.”
“Oh yes, yes,” Mr. Brimner said gravely, as if accepting vital dogma.
Thea suspected that perhaps Mr. Hill, busy with his family and his garden, did not mind having a limit placed on his conversion labours. He had none of the uncomfortable religious zeal she remembered from missionaries they had known in the West. He reminded her more of Mr. Hinch, the finicky curate in Yarmouth, an authority on Gregorian chant who was happy to gossip in Aunt Queen’s parlour. Perhaps zeal was for missions in the wilderness. Tonga could not be called wilderness; its ancient people, its long history and the presence of quite so many churches all precluded that.
The girl came out to the porch with her brother to call Kay in for tea and cakes. They were named Muriel and Peregrine—a silly name for a boy, but Kay did not say so. Inside, the house was stuffy and dark, with a smell of church over must. Thea and Mrs. Hill sat drinking tea at the table while Mr. Brimner and Mr. Hill talked at the other side of the room in the only other chairs. Mr. Hill had lit a pipe, another reek. Muriel took Kay to sit on a bolster against the wall with a plate of quite nice cakes, if you did not mind chewing.
They sat silent; Kay was listening to the others talk, and Muriel seemed to have no conversation. She was twelve or thirteen, taller than Kay, but not by much. She kept watch over Peregrine and did not allow him to have another cake, after two. He looked as though he might pout but was distracted by a toy donkey cart he found under a cushion, and spent a long time going back and forth on the linoleum, murmuring clip-clop clip-clop to himself. Muriel said he was six, but the golden curls made him seem younger.
The burden of going on and on like this, sitting in rooms listening to people talk, weighed down on Kay. The thought of living for perhaps eighty more years, or even fifty—or until she had a baby and died of it like her mama—when even one year or one day more was unbearable. More of this and then more, all of it tedium and irritation. The same feeling descended on her at the start of church, at the first Dearly beloved. This house was infested with churchiness. What was the use of going elsewhere in the world when you brought everything dull along with you?
The ladies were rising. By the window, Mr. Hill and Mr. Brimner turned, staring as if they were surprised to see them still there.
“Will you walk with us toward the harbour?” Mrs. Hill asked Thea, which meant Kay would also have to go and walk in the heat. “I am going to call on Mrs. Rachel Tonga, a great lady of the town, and I believe she will be glad to meet you.”
They left the men in the shadowy house and walked out into one dusty lane after another, and soon went diagonally across a long, scrubby promenade of grass, like a street but with no paving, and then along a withy fence toward the harbour once more.
The great white house with red roofs they had seen from the harbour was the palace, Muriel said. It had not looked like a palace to Kay; it was not even as large as Aunt Lydia’s house at Lake Milo.
As they walked, Mrs. Hill did most of the talking. She knew all the royal family, and all those who were related to royalty, in which exact degree, who had done what to whom many years ago, and what that second person had done about it—as if she had transferred an English interest in monarchy straight over to Tonga, with all the reverence attached. Kay found it impossible to fathom the story of the king’s second marriage, or its ramifications for Princess Salote, who had been sent away last year and was now “practically exiled” in New Zealand to attend what sounded like a very ordinary girls’ school, while the people waited for her father’s new wife to have a son, who would be the heir.
Mrs. Hill told them that Mrs. Rachel Tonga (with whom Princess Salote had been lodged before her exile) lived with her sister Sela and Sela’s husband Sione Mateialona, who had once been the premier. Rachel and Sela, she said, were “real Tongan ladies—certainly the most intelligent and best-mannered I have seen.” She paused to chide Peregrine for jumping and creating dust that might coat the ladies’ muslin.
Mrs. Rachel Tonga lived along the Beach Road in Kolomotu‘a, west of the palace. West also of the British consul and the Residency, which Thea told Mrs. Hill she was most interested to see, although when Kay wanted to know why, she could not say precisely.
“Oh, because of Empire, I suppose,” she said, and laughed a little.
Kay looked up at her sideways. She said nothing impertinent but allowed her gait to slow so that she walked behind Thea.
“It is a handsome building, is all I meant,” Thea added.
Then Kay wished she had not asked why. She did not intend to be a disagreeable person, even though it sometimes came out that way.
“Mrs. Rachel Tonga keeps proper house, you’ll see,” Mrs. Hill promised as they came closer, on this hot and too-long walk. “Very grand and clean. They are fakapapalangi, living in the European style, unlike some of the locals.”
“They have a little dog,” Muriel told Kay. “A pug dog.”
“I have a dog,” Kay said, and went back to worrying about Pilot, and whether he might have slipped off the deck and drowned in the sea.
The house was a low white bungalow with a handsome veranda decorated with angular gingerbread. Mrs. Rachel and Sela sat on the low stoop in their shirt sleeves.
“You have caught us resting from our washtubs,” Mrs. Rachel told Mrs. Hill, laughing. She was a strongly built, warm-faced woman, bulky at first glance but graceful when she moved. A comfortable presence, calm in her own powerful good sense, and she spoke English perfectly well.
Another woman, Miss Winifred Small, came as they were standing on the steps. She too was kindly welcoming when Thea and Kay were explained as connections of the new Anglican missionary.
Kay liked Miss Winifred, who was youngish, and prettyish, although some might call her plain. While the ladies talked, she looked like she was thinking of interesting other ideas. Miss Winifred had lived in Tonga from childhood, among the Wesleyan people. She had with her a friend, Lisia Fifita, a round young woman in a straight blue dress, and Lisia’s little girl Eponie, all dark eyes and glowing skin, perhaps three or four. A lovely child, with a deep dimple that came and went, although she was shy to smile. She put a warm hand on Thea’s knee, patting gently in welcome, and soon Thea pulled her up to sit in her lap, where she settled in so comfortably that Kay could almost feel the tender weight herself.
As the women talked, Kay took off her hat to let the little girl try it on. Liquid, velvet-brown eyes looked up from inside the brim, absurdly happy. When Kay asked for it back, Eponie took it off at once and held it out, but her eyes filled with great tears that spilled over and tracked down her darling cheeks. Thea shook her head. “That is Kay’s only hat,” she said. But she kissed the little girl’s soft cheek.
In their height and strength the women were interesting to look at, but their conversation might have been ordinary lady-chat in Yarmouth, and Kay wished they were at least still with Mr. Brimner, rather than on this strange visit.
When she glanced up and saw Peregrine toddling out over the lawn, she followed as if she was looking after him, although she did not intend to bother fetching him back.
They wandered along the expanse of grass and sand, stopping when Peregrine wanted to. Muriel came after them, even though Kay was finished talking to her. She was an insipid girl, perhaps not a dolt, but not interested in anything of the mind. She talked about ribbons, what she had eaten for breakfast and what there would be for tea. Peregrine did not talk, he merely put a rock in his mouth from time to time, which Muriel would hasten to make him spit out. He was not clever either. Kay felt quite alone.
They wandered for some little time over the gentle swell of grassy park, until they were far out of sight of the women. The landscape was not empty, but the few men scattered about seemed to be taking rest, sitting under trees with their arms folded on their knees, gazing into the middle distance.
Seeing some landmark, Muriel stopped, and said that they had got into the palace grounds, where they should not be. She pulled Peregrine back, but he did not want to go, his attention was fixed forward. Ahead of them on a shadowed path lay a shadowy shape. As they looked, the shape began to move. A rock or boulder moving—how strange. Oh! It was an enormous turtle, quite a yard high.
“It is the Tu‘i Malila,” Muriel said. “The oldest tortoise in the world.”
Kay took a step toward it.
The turtle’s head lifted, pointed and tiny. Its narrow eye regarded her.
After a moment, it blinked. One wrinkled stump of a leg lifted, and it took a step toward them.
“It is hurt! Look, the marks on its back?”
“No, that is very old. Captain Cook carved his initials on it, they say, when he gave it to the Tu‘i Tonga— No, no, Peregrine, come away!” Muriel caught at Peregrine’s hand and pulled.
Kay expected the boy to complain, but he did not. It was a very strange tortoise. Perhaps it frightened him a little, as it did her.
Muriel came back and plucked at Kay’s sleeve. “Come, come away, I am sure you will see him again, he is the king of Malila, the oldest tortoise in the world. He was given to the king very long ago. When you go to the palace later, you will hear all about him.”
As Kay lingered, wishing to go closer, the tortoise took another step. It was a moving hill, red and black, a bulge in the fabric of the earth. As old as the stones at the edge of the sea.
Francis was busy aboard ship, taking advantage of their stop for painting and refurbishing, mending sails torn in the great storm, and all the domestic duties that had been waiting his attention. Kay was glad Thea did not decide it was time to turn out the saloon as well, so they could come ashore every morning and spend the last days with Mr. Brimner; except that they did not see enough of him, because Mr. Hill commandeered him.
On their last day, Mr. Hill arranged an excursion out to a famous landmark, a standing stone like Stonehenge, but (Mr. Hill said) “not so ancient, but still very old for this part of the world.” They drove out two carts; Kay went with Miss Winifred and Lisia in their cart.
It was a relief to Kay to be alone with them. Not only because she had tired of Mr. Hill, who was a tedious gabster, but because—because Thea walked everywhere, in every company, as the most superior person in the room. It was not egotistical of her, it was simply her perception of the reality of things, her calm understanding of the strength of her character and education and the protection of her religion. Kay thought it odd that she herself had not received that same certainty from Father, spending so much time in his company. Her sense of her own position in the world seemed to come out as—not lower than other people, precisely, but off to one side.
Kay had once or twice seen Thea’s sense of superiority registering with Miss Winifred, kind as she was and accommodating to the foreigner’s odd opinions. Travelling alone with them, Kay could enjoy Miss Winifred and Lisia, could talk to them and listen to them talk together of people they knew and new babies and the king and other interesting matters.
They drove past groups of drowsy men sleeping on the side of the road or anywhere a little shade could be found, out some distance to the village of Niutoua. At last, there it was: a great lintel and doorway standing in a field.
It was very large, certainly. They all got out of the carts.
Mr. Hill had the facts at his fingertips. Thea did not seem to mind listening to him, though most likely he had been talking ceaselessly during the whole journey.
“Ha‘amonga ‘a Maui—the Burden of Maui! Constructed from three limestone slabs, nearly twenty feet high,” he told them. “Built at the beginning of the thirteenth century under the eleventh Tu‘i Tonga Tu‘itātui, for some purpose of determining or celebrating the solstice, or as the gateway to his royal compound.”
Kay wished he would be quiet.
The thing was large, fine. Made of spongy stone, like a lintel for a temple—mainly interesting because the lines of the interior were so straight, after all those centuries. What she liked better was the strange slab stuck into the ground farther down the slope, in a little grove. The throne.
“This is the ‘esi maka faakinanga, stone to lean against,” Miss Winifred said. She too had wandered away from Mr. Hill’s lecture, perhaps having heard it many times before, or knowing more about it all than Mr. Hill did, since she had grown up here. She set the palm of one large, smooth hand against the green-black rock, higher than her head.
“They say we were giants in the olden days. They say this was the old Tu‘i Tonga’s throne—his name, Tu’itātui, means King Strike the Knee. With his back to this great stone, he was safe from assassins from behind, and with his long stick”—she lunged at Kay!—“he would strike out at the knees of every enemy in front. In the oldest times, they say, they burned the bushes, so that from this place he would be able to see enemies coming from over the sea.”
She had said we were giants. Was Miss Winifred a Tongan, then, too? She had dark hair and strong bones; she did not look like Lisia, but perhaps that did not matter.
Kay never knew what one ought to do in the presence of old things. She touched the rock. A man had once sat pressed against this rock, in fear of assassins—and had lashed out with a stick and broken some knees.
She tried to feel if the Tu‘i Tonga’s ghost still sat there, but could not sense it. But it was, all the same, her favourite thing she had seen all this time in Tonga: its flat, unembellished surface, out in the little grove that had grown up around it, hidden away from the world because the places that enemies came from had changed.
In the early afternoon they travelled on to Fùa, the village where Mr. Brimner was to serve, and the people there laid out a welcome feast for them on tablecloths of palm leaves: roast pig and chickens and white yams, wrapped in more leaves. Some girls brought round the packages of food, and some girls danced.
Lisia took Kay close to the dancing floor, where a girl was being dressed for the dancing. “My cousin Lotoa,” Lisia murmured in Kay’s ear.
“She is beautiful,” Kay whispered back.
Lisia stroked her arm, tenderly agreeing. “All my family is beautiful.”
An old woman crept around Lotoa’s feet, anointing them with some substance—Lisia said it was coconut oil, mixed with fragrance—smoothing the oil on Lotoa’s calves and shins and on her legs, far up, even under her tapa cloth skirt, until they were glossy. Rising to her feet with no seeming effort, the old mother oiled Lotoa’s arms and shoulders. Lotoa spread it on her neck and bosom and across her upper arms, smiling to herself as she became the shining one. Kay felt it in her own arms and breast, cool oil sliding down the front of her own chemise.
All the girls were burnished with coconut oil by their mothers until their arms glistened in the dance, which was both modest and immodest: the girls kept their legs at all times carefully close together, bent at the knees in a docile crouch, but they swayed intoxicatingly, and moved their shining hands in a complicated series of meaningful gestures (which Kay invented translations for, all ocean voyages and pledging allegiance and yielding to love). The dancers were accompanied by two old men and an old lady, singing at one side of the dance floor in cracked, almost shouting voices that were nevertheless very sweet.
There was always singing. Late at night, even in her cabin on the Morning Light, Kay heard the singing carrying from the shore. Men’s voices and women’s, so close-blended that she could not tell if they were singing harmony or all the same notes but in different shades of voices. Church went on all the time too, all night it seemed. It was a strange country, but more real to her than other places she had been. The people were not setting their best face to the water, pretending for guests. The whole island, as far as she had ridden by cart and pony trap, was the same, people living exactly as they had lived for a very long time, except with more churches.
That day, Bishop Willis made harbour from Christchurch. When they returned from the village feast, he was awaiting them, an elderly, bony, straggle-bearded man, large hands and feet out of proportion to the amount of meat left on him. Kay disliked him strongly. Perhaps he had some flavour of Father in his knitted, protruding brow. He was all rigged out in black, ancient black gaiters coming down over his boots in frog-pads, and he wore a balked expression. As if ripe to do some balking of his own.
Beside him sat a small, neat man with a brown Vandyke beard, so tidily combed it looked false. Kay had an urge to pull it. In a tone of gloomy triumph, the bishop introduced this fellow as Mr. Piper-Ffrench, late of Christchurch, New Zealand, and the new incumbent for Fùa.
But that was the village where they had just been feted—Mr. Brimner’s new parish. Kay did not understand.
On the dining table the bishop set a thick paper, with printing and writing on it. “There is yet a niche for you, Brimner, never fear,” he intoned, as if reading the litany. He pushed the paper across, saying, “Your new orders, my dear sir.”
Mr. Brimner bent to examine the sheet, taking out his spectacles and polishing them as his eyes raced over the page. He did not need his glasses for close work, Kay knew, only for time to think.
“Spare me your recriminations,” the bishop said, holding up one knob-knuckled hand.
Mr. Brimner had made none.
“The island archipelago of Ha‘apai has been underserved, although the worthy Mr. Fruelock has established a school on the main island, Pangai. Dr. Barnes of Christchurch believes it will be wise to expand our diocese into the islands nearby. Ha‘ano is the island he suggests, and he has travelled there often enough to be sure you would be welcome. The Society has purchased a rudimentary house, with an outbuilding suitable for renovation into a school, which we will consecrate in the spring, once you have made the desired changes.”
Seeing Kay’s attention, Mr. Brimner slid the sheet over so she could read it. The parchment was signed at the bottom with a huge flourish: Alfred Tonga.
Kay looked up, questioning. Not moving his eyes from his reading, Mr. Brimner murmured, “That is how bishops sign, using their See as their name.”
Pomp and ceremony unfolded in Kay’s mind like a shabby velvet carpet rolling out to a set of marble steps. She squinted up the steps into the expanding darkness of one kind of universe—then turned her mind away from all that, because it was a sham. In her experience God was interior, or vastly exterior, not bothered with position or hierarchy. But some poor silly folk did think it mattered.
Thea was disappointed on Mr. Brimner’s behalf, but proud of their friend. His courtesy never faltered, upon being informed that he had arrived too late to take up the post he had been promised. Was the bishop using the royal we? In his old-fashioned black gabardine, he looked to Thea like a great mangy vulture, squawking. Like that vile Mr. Drummond who came to Blade Lake, visiting the school and demanding a reduction of their budget…
She stopped, her attention turned inside. She had begun to feel uncomfortable during the ride back to Nuku‘alofa, and now a strong interior cramping made her forget Mr. Brimner’s trouble in her own.
Dodging through the back kitchen and down the moonlit garden to the outhouse, Thea lifted her skirts and sat just as a wave took her over. Oh, she thought. Oh my dear.
And then a flooding out. The pain was nothing, no more troubling than was ordinary for her courses. She almost wished it had been more, to register the fact of it. Two months’ delay—she had been allowing herself to believe that God had forgiven her.
It felt like the bottom had dropped out of everything. But Mrs. Hill had left a basket of rags there, and after some time of spasmodic flow it was possible to clean herself and rig a wadding for her underclothes, to avoid stain or discovery. She did not like to think of the tiny homunculus down there in the cesspit, but since there was no help for it, she pushed that from her mind, and also whether the child already had a soul, and whether she should pray, and why she could not do so.
She did not cry. After a few minutes to compose herself, she walked back to the house, the bright moon making it easy to see the path. It was over, that was all.
At the wharf, Francis came over with the tender. He was surprised to find Mr. Brimner returning in the trap with them, but quick to put a kind face on it. “Sailing on, eh? Ha‘apai—well, well, that lies on our way, not more than a hundred miles north,” Francis said, at Thea’s hand on his arm. “Farther to travel, eh, Mr. Brimner? It is often the way.”
After these several days’ delay, Francis was impatient to be on their way, but not at all ill-tempered with it. Thea pressed his arm and resolved never to tell him of the—the newly lost. A little clot of blood, that was all.
The full moon shone so ferociously from the heavens that the night was bright as day. Mr. Brimner was down below unpacking, readying for the next thing.
Kay kicked the leather ball again for Pilot, who raced down the deck to catch it before it went into the scupper. He overshot the mark, and his nose went smack into the metal ditch, but he shook his head and caught the ball in his sharp white teeth, and trotted off to take it to someone else, as was his annoying habit, flag-tail waving at the prospect of another chase.
She looked after him down the length of the ship, hoping it was not Arthur Wetmore he aimed for, because that might make Francis cross.
Mr. Brimner materialized out of the not-darkness beside her. “What a moon,” he said. “σελήνη—Selene,” he said. “And on a night like this, πανσελήνη—”
“Pan-selene,” Kay said. “All-moon—full moon?”
“That’s it.” He pulled out his tobacco pouch and lit a cheroot, which he saved for special occasions. “Your progress has been splendid, my dear Kay. I have no qualms about abandoning you to work alone. But I wonder if from time to time you would perhaps write me a letter, perhaps in the original Greek, so that I can enjoy your further progress?”
Kay felt her mouth stretching, that kind of smiling that is more like pain.
When they emerged on deck into the bright morning, Lifuka lay before them, the largest island of Ha‘apai, reached during the night. Francis had already sent a boat to the wharf at Pangai town with a message for Mr. Fruelock, to whom Mr. Brimner was to report, and had had word back inviting all who cared to visit Pangai to come ashore. Kay wanted to go, of course, and after the restorative tea Thea agreed; she too was curious to meet Mr. Brimner’s colleague.
He was waiting on the wharf—easily recognized, a black crow in the crowd of white-tunicked men, wearing stovepipe trousers rather than a mat round his waist, with a very wide vicar’s hat. He looked almost Tongan, so brown was his skin from sun. He had the black hair that goes with an olive complexion, and looked a good deal healthier and more reliable than Mr. Hill, Thea was glad to see.
Mr. Fruelock shook hands generally and welcomed them all to Ha‘apai, and to the village of Pangai, and begged them to set forth with him on a short walk.
“My wife is at the school but will break off when we arrive, for she is eager to meet you, Mr. Brimner. Mr. Hill has sung your praises these many months, and we are delighted to have a scholar of your proportion, although you may find little exercise for the mind at first, beyond learning the new tongue. Do not be astonished if you find pupils who can engage to— Ah! here we are, and here is my dear wife. Dorothy! Come and meet Mr. Brimner, and of course Mrs. Grant and Miss, um, her sister…”
They had arrived at a low-walled house on a quiet lane removed from the main road. The woman at the door wore a welcoming smile on her broad, clever face. She came out to greet them and took Thea’s arm in a friendly way, exclaiming that they had never thought to have such a treat today, a visit from a captain’s wife!
Thea pressed Kay’s hand, and she slipped behind Mr. Brimner to let him greet Mrs. Fruelock, who was as tall as he—a good deal taller, standing on the step.
“So this is Mr. Brimner!” she said, looking down in a satisfied way. “We are fortunate, and I hope you will count yourself to be so too, once you have found your feet here. I hope your voyage was supportable—are you a good sailor? I am not, myself—the voyage here was misery, I tell Eric I will never make another…”
Still talking, she led them into the interior darkness and along a tiled hall to a large sitting room. There were actual chairs. Clean and airy, white-curtained, the room had a comfortable feeling, and made Thea feel well-disposed to Mrs. Fruelock. Mr. Fruelock saw to his guests’ disposition while his wife poured water into tall glasses; the day was hot enough to make that very welcome. Three girls emerged, each with a plate of biscuits and cut fruit, which they set down carefully before curtsying to the newcomers.
“Back to school now, girls,” Mrs. Fruelock told them. “We will come in a few moments, to see how well the children are coming on, and then we will have some singing.”
Kay stayed standing by Thea’s chair, perhaps a little shy of the girls. One looked to be older than Kay, Thea thought, and the others a year or two younger.
“Let me congratulate you, sir, on your assignment to this diocese, and to this mission,” Fruelock said formally, and shook Mr. Brimner’s hand all over again. He sat, stood, bustled a little, rummaging for a paper, and sat again. “Well! Here is a map to show you— Oh, you have? Well, no need to look again, then.” He set the map aside. “You are on a two years’ gift, I believe—the bishop has no doubt told you that this is a mission post?”
Mr. Brimner nodded. Still a little pale under his sun-pinked skin from last night’s upset.
Mrs. Fruelock nodded with him. “No church. No. But teaching!”
That seemed odd to Thea. What was the point of a mission without a church? Mr. Brimner was looking off to the long white wall, where the jalousied blinds let in slits of light in a shifting pattern on the plaster.
Mr. Fruelock stood again, and sat again. Crossed his thin legs. “Yes!” He crossed his legs the other way. “It is a delicate business here in Ha‘apai, between the Wesleyans and the relatively new Free Church of Tonga—which is also Wesleyan, the church to which the king belongs. But the rift, for we must call it that, allows of movement. I do credit Bishop Willis, his judgment is acute. He presents, or rather we present, here in Ha‘apai, a kind of wedge that may drive through—although always in a Christian sense!—to bring more converts into the comfortable fold of Anglo-Catholic worship. The bishop fears the Latter Day Saints will return with the Samoan mission. In fact, they have already established a school in Neiafu, and there are rumours of property purchased for a church in Nuku‘alofa.”
These machinations were not unfamiliar to Thea from the Indian missions in Canada. But there seemed to be an embarrassment of churches involved here.
“But the LDS are not our chief concern. Assuredly, the Roman Catholics will arrive in force! We hope equally to save these poor islanders from the excess of the Romans, as we instill the principles of Christian love in the heathen heart.”
“Not that there are actual heathens left in Tonga!” Mrs. Fruelock struck in. “Because the Work has been strong!”
“Yes, ah! Yes, it has, my love. But delicate, as I say. And so—no church here, as yet, but we make inroads. My dear wife runs the infant school, and I take pupils in the middle school, but we believe, that is, the bishop believes, a school in the hamlet of Ha‘ano will provide a foothold on the island and strengthen our position in all of Ha‘apai…This entails considerable responsibility for you.”
It seemed Mr. Fruelock was a schemer, a political animal. Mr. Brimner would never be that. But he was a very good teacher, Thea knew. They were fortunate to have him.
Mrs. Fruelock patted a firm, kindly paw on Mr. Brimner’s knee. “Eric has secured you a house. The outbuilding, in need of some repair, will do for a schoolroom…”
“Yes, yes, he will see all that soon enough,” said Mr. Fruelock. “Now we must pray, Dorothy, and perhaps you can show Mrs. Grant and Miss Um the school? We have Shirley Baker’s printing of the Book of Common Prayer in Tongan, Brimner—a Wesleyan, but a man of parts, Anglican in his outlook, moving toward conversion, I believe, in his later years. Anyhow, his translation will do until Bishop Willis finishes his own, next year…Gracious, Dorothy, are you still here? Do proceed, and I will strive here with Mr. Brimner, and then take him to see Baker’s grave—a side note to our current struggles…”
Prayer was a working mechanism for Mr. Fruelock. They were still following Mrs. Fruelock out as he bent his head fiercely forward and began, “O God, who hast made of one blood all the peoples of the earth, and didst send thy blessed Son to preach peace to those who are far off…”
“Eric is not un-devout,” Mrs. Fruelock was saying, “you must understand, dear Mrs. Grant—but he is single-minded. The task is the establishment of solid ground in Ha‘apai, which nothing but zeal can accomplish. And even then—well. We shall see.”
She led them out into a sunlit enclosure, tamped-down earth and a few parched weeds, and across into a building with jalousie windows, a long porch giving shade to the windows. Inside, in two classrooms, were twenty or thirty children, one half repeating a vocabulary list from the board under the direction of an older girl with tidy braids, the other reciting by rote as another older girl—a pale, pretty girl, who must be another Fruelock daughter—pointed to pictures pinned to the wall. All the children were neatly turned out in long green tunics. Some of the boys wore mats, but not all. Perhaps they were not all well-connected, Thea thought, since the mat seemed to be a mark of rank or prestige.
They poured out of the rooms and mustered into rows under direction from the two elder girls, crying greetings from group to group until hushed and orderly. “Mālō,” they said in unison, and then broke into a laughing discord of “Mālō! Mālō e lelei!” Miss Winifred had told them that mālō e lelei meant “it is good to be alive,” but the people seemed to use it as both “hello” and “thank you.” Mrs. Fruelock translated again: “Congratulations on being well, they are telling you. Being in good health is worthy of gratitude to our Lord!”
The children sang a greeting song, bathing their guests in good nature, and then gave a display of poetry, including recitations of “The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck” and Rossetti’s “Up-Hill” and other famous works, made charming by their great enthusiasm for the task. They laughed at each other and prompted the speakers when words failed, and were equally happy to be dismissed at the end of their demonstration.
One little boy came directly to Thea, and stood beside her, patting her knee with his hand. Five or six, perhaps. He was serious, and looked up into her eyes with complete trust, as if he already knew and loved her. “Mālō,” he whispered, leaning closer.
“That is Sione, don’t let him bother you. Be good, Sione!” said one of the Fruelock daughters, Thea did not know which.
She laughed and said, “He is perfectly good, are you not, Sione?”
He lifted his eyebrows several times, such a funny little man, as if trying to tell her something secret.
“That means yes, he is saying yes, yes,” said the Fruelock girl, and Thea bent and raised her own eyebrows back at him, yes yes yes! Refreshing to see her look less forbidding than usual.
She and Kay clapped with as much vigour as they could, and were swarmed with more children come to give a special mālō before they ran off and out the green wooden gate.
Mrs. Fruelock waved them away and set her daughters to tidying the schoolrooms, and said that after such a strenuous morning she felt the need of her dinner, did not Mrs. Grant? She called her daughters to order and they came at once, the youngest one slowly, because she had skinned her knee and was weeping a little, but still with good nature.
Dorothy Fruelock ran both the school and her household with such efficiency and lack of fuss that Thea felt ashamed of her own efforts at Blade Lake. No emergency fazed her. While attending to the daughter whose knee was skinned and needed ointment, she directed other daughters to the putting on of the kettle and the setting out of linens and cake tins, so that very soon the midday dinner was spread out neatly on the board, although Mrs. Fruelock’s attention had remained fixed on her task and she had never raised her voice or become cross, as Thea might have done. Knee mended, she patted the daughter off to the garden with her sisters and Kay, and settled back in her chair for a cozy and leisurely visit with Thea while they waited for the gentlemen to join them.
Mr. Fruelock’s wife was lovely, Kay thought. Her name was Dorothy, the same as Thea’s name Theodora, but backwards, and much more modern. And she was a teacher too, but with all those girls of her own, identical in white smocks, identically well-scrubbed except for the bandaged knee of the littlest one.
Kay did not mind being sent away with the girls. Mr. Fruelock had Mr. Brimner closeted in his study anyhow. In a little while he would go down to the wharf with them and board the Morning Light again for the short trip to Ha‘ano. The mission boat, upended in the back of the garden awaiting repairs, looked like it would be some time till it was seaworthy, but Mr. Brimner would not be trapped on the smaller island: Mr. Fruelock said he could borrow a Wesleyan boat for the asking, and promised he would be out himself within the week to see how things were going on. So that was all right. And it was only for two years—he had only promised to stay that long in mission.
Some of the girls were younger than she was, their names all flowers, hard to remember. Rose was the eldest, four years older than Kay; she had been teaching the native children. Then Violet, Lily and Pansy—or was it Daisy? It must be Pansy. In former years, when Kay had sometimes made lists of the children she would have, there was always a Daisy on the list; sometimes she had a twin, called Buttercup. The girls were undemanding company, sufficient in themselves, content to continue a long-running, complicated game involving a pattern scraped in the dust and the tossing of a stone and jumping to and fro. Kay stood at the edge of their marked-out turf, looking away into the gardens. Small birds flitted through the trees, twittering to each other, mālō, mālō e lelei.
Mr. Brimner had sent a message to Francis, asking if he could be ferried on to Ha’ano, and Francis himself came in answer. He had discovered a minor leak on the Morning Light, a matter of caulking that should be done before setting out for Fiji, and had left Mr. Wright to oversee it while he came ashore to fetch Thea. The Fruelocks offered beds for the night, but there was no need for that, Francis said. The work would be done today, and they might as well wait till morning to take Mr. Brimner on to Ha‘ano; but he intended to take Thea back to the ship for a proper rest, if she was willing.
Looking at Kay, who shook her head violently, Thea laughed a little. “You may spirit me away, dear Francis, but I think Kay would like to stay and spend the day with the girls, if she may?”
Mrs. Fruelock said of course, and that they would undertake to get her back to the ship with Mr. Brimner after supper. Kay loved her even more.
“I am grateful, Captain,” Mr. Brimner said. He looked pinched about the eyes, tired perhaps from the indisposition of the previous night—perhaps from the strain and delay in reaching his destination. Anybody might find it difficult. He did not know the language yet, and was to be sent to a separate island without English company at all or anyone to talk to. Kay would be frightened, if it was her, going there all alone.
Mrs. Fruelock smote her hands together and said they must go to market now, to send provisions with Mr. Brimner. The girls took the plates. Swept up in their industry, Kay was given a tea towel to dry with. When they came back to the sitting room, the adults were ready to walk out.
Taking a little pull-wagon, sufficient for Mr. Brimner’s needs, they walked to a market lot where trays were laid out in the sun with a straw awning over them and a woman or man sitting behind each; there was a shack with shelves inside it, on which were two or three jars and a few canned goods. Mrs. Fruelock spoke in Tongan to each person, warm fluid syllables, beginning each conversation with mālō, mālō e lelei, mālō aupito. One of the older women asked them “Na’a ke kai?” which Mrs. Fruelock said was a very traditional greeting meaning have you eaten? From an olden time when perhaps you might not have, Kay guessed. She wished Francis had brought Pilot ashore. With a rope to keep him, he would find this market interesting, and there did not seem to be any wild dogs to worry him.
Mrs. Fruelock told Mr. Brimner she could provide flour and sugar from their own store, and the people of Ha‘ano would give him white sweet potatoes and fish, but he would need sorghum, corned beef and various other things—tea, and tinned milk, for there was no fresh milk on the islands. Mr. Brimner declared he had no need for milk, being a plain man who took his tea in its natural state, so (murmuring, “But guests!”) Mrs. Fruelock contented herself with two cans, and went on heaping bananas and melons into a bushel basket. She promised him a brace of good-laying hens before Christmas, and he said he would be glad of eggs. So they continued in a bantering promenade around the various stalls.
Kay and Rose followed along, the younger girls darting off through the market to see their own friends.
Rose said, “Is he your father?”
“Mr. Brimner? No! He is my teacher.”
“Oh. I thought he might be—I knew the captain could not be.”
“No, he is married to my sister.”
Rose looked at Kay through her lashes. “He is very handsome.”
Kay was startled.
“Captain Grant, I mean,” Rose said. Her mouth pulled into a considering moue. “Your sister is quite old.”
People had interior selves, Kay already knew. But this secret wickedness was a surprise.
“She is no older than he,” she said. “They were engaged for ten years, because he was at sea and she was teaching the Indians.”
Rose shrugged. “She looks old. Many captains stop here. Many of them have lovers here, so perhaps that is why your sister travels with him now.”
Kay turned away from that girl without saying anything more. She walked back along the dusty road to the jetty and stood there for a time, waiting for a boat. But it came to her that they could not know on the Morning Light that she wanted a boat yet, and might not see her standing there. Eventually, after walking a good deal farther than she might have, she found the Fruelocks’ house again, recognizing it by the green wooden gate into the schoolyard. She stood about in the back garden a while longer, watching through the window where Mr. Brimner and Mrs. Fruelock were carrying on a laughing conversation, while Mr. Fruelock worked irritably at a desk. She did not go inside when the girls carried the supper dishes in, either. Rose was as sleek and proper as always, her eyes down-turned.
Kay decided to wait until Mr. Brimner came out to walk to the jetty. Mrs. Fruelock must think she had already gone back to the boat. Perhaps Rose had told them so.
You cannot know what is inside people’s heads, Kay thought. And Rose was older than she was, fifteen or sixteen. Kay could not fault her for it, though she did dislike her. Girls thought of love at that age, and in this strange missionary landscape she had no one to think about but the visitors.
Kay told herself she would not treat Francis differently because some girl thought him handsome. It prickled her, though, that Rose had not asked about Mr. Brimner, who was much younger than Francis and, if not precisely handsome, a very good sort of person.
Dusk had fallen as it did here, too early and too fast, and the night garden became soft and strange. Birds flew above—or, no! They were bats, great bats flitting in the branches in black silhouette. Nothing was wrong with bats, anyhow, but that they had a wrong or a different tempo, when you were not expecting them.
A feeling of unreality settled over Kay, the human part of life shown up as unreal, unreliable. Or merely unimportant. The bats moved quickly, shadows in the sky. Like voles in their movement, going swimmingly across the patches of dark-blue sky.
In an hour or so, Mr. Brimner came out, trundling the wagon of supplies behind him, and Kay fell into step beside him. He did not seem surprised to see her.
“There you are. Found the company of all those biddable girls trying, did you?”
Kay nodded in the darkness.
They went on in companionable steps, not speaking, the moon giving enough light that they could have walked all night. But they soon reached the jetty. Mr. Brimner lit the lamp to signal the boat to come out for them, and they arranged themselves on the stones to wait.
“October the fourth. This is the anniversary of my ordination,” Mr. Brimner said. “I therefore indulged in a tot of rum, in lieu of the venerable sherry in the MCR. It makes me friendlier, I do notice that.”
Was he unfriendly, usually? He seemed to Kay to be an entirely serious person, separate, solitary. But easy to work beside.
“I am rather reticent in the social niceties. Not shy, only restrained. But I must tell you, my dear Kay, that I will miss your good company.”
His face burst or blossomed into his beaming smile, the excessive beam that broke his face in half and stretched his mouth—a great many large teeth showing, caught in the moonlight. His forehead was damp, but the smile was sweet, refuting the glistening jumble within.
Kay smiled back, or tried to; she was not much good at it. She had dreamed last night, she now remembered, that it was possible to love someone who is conventionally ugly. (But it was not Mr. Brimner in her dream, it was a larger man, with a bald head and a tender face.)
“Most beautiful,” he said—and the words hung for a moment in the air. “Most beautiful I leave: the light of the sun. Second: bright stars, the face of the moon—but also: ripe cucumbers, apples, and pears.” He bowed in some vague easterly direction. “Praxilla, a poetess! The shades in the Underworld asked her what was the most beautiful thing she left behind…Most beautiful I leave: the light of the sun.” He paused for a moment, and then recited it in Greek. “κάλλιστον μὲν ὲγὼ λείπω φάος ἠλίοιο, δεύτερον ἄστρα φαεινὰ σεληναίης τε πρόσωπον, ἠδὲ καὶ ὡραίους σικύους καὶ μῆλα καὶ ὄχνας.”
Kay nodded. No cucumbers in this place. No apples, no pears. The boat came toward them out of the inky water, and they descended the stone stairs to meet it.
In the morning they set off for Ha‘ano. A mere jaunt, as it turned out: an hour’s easy sail along the in-curving western coast, with a light breeze to make it pleasant. Kay and Mr. Brimner did not open a book, but leaned together on the port-side railing. At the near horizon, a perfect triangle of a mountain rose, occupying a whole island.
“A volcanic isle,” Mr. Brimner said, pointing it out to Kay. “I believe that must be the island they call Kao. The one to the left, that is Tofua, an extinct volcano, with a crater cutting off the top. Mr. Fruelock tells me there is a lake within, and that someday we will take an expedition there, to visit the sole resident.”
So he would have an excursion to look forward to; Kay was glad to think that.
“Not to convert the old person—of course not,” Mr. Brimner added. “Nor to school him. I suppose he must have learned everything he needs to know already about how to live in these parts.”
Seaton pushed his frowsy head up out of the lifeboat behind them, saying, “There’s some as have not enough to do and must rouse workingmen too early.”
Mr. Brimner touched Kay’s arm to bring her attention back, and pointed out over the sea. “There,” he said.
She looked. Nothing. The water was calm, a mirror for the sky.
Jacky Judge came pelting down the deck on silent feet, waving an arm. He reached them and pointed too, mouthing there!
Again she turned to the sea, and waited.
The volcano in the distance, the quiet motion of the ship. Nothing.
And then, there.
A huge shape melted upward out of the water, and another behind it, melted into air and back into water in a rounded, elongated gleam of wet black skin.
Nobody spoke.
Two of them, one large, the other immeasurable. Black gloss in blue gloss.
Kay looked and looked, until her eyes were stretched.
Out of the nothing, out from under the ship and out into the water that was all the water always, up came another great shape in a thundering rise, twisting into white underside, falling into a great foam—breaching—breaching, that was the word.
“Are you afraid?” asked Jacky Judge, and Kay looked scorn at him.
Francis, coming to watch, told her, “I started out on a whaler, twenty years ago—lucky to come safe out of it.”
“But they are so—gigantic, so beyond our ordinary scale, I do not see how the first person decided to kill a whale.”
“Fear! Some are afraid of anything larger than themselves, and want therefore to kill it. The world is full of bad apples,” Francis pronounced, and went back to his work.
The women in Ha‘ano had made a special mat for Mr. Brimner, of white straw with the word T E A C H E R spelled out in darker fibres. They were standing at the stone jetty when the Morning Light sailed into view. How had they known to come out? Someone must have been keeping lookout for the stranger arriving.
The stone jetty was just thirty feet long, and as they followed the welcoming people up the slight rise beyond, they saw that the village held only a sprinkling of little houses. Straw roofs, tiny windows, garden plots around them. One house near the shore was a little larger; beside it, a long, low building stood with windows open to the air. That was the building that was waiting to be the school, but it had no tables or desks yet. The floor was dusty, and in one corner a broken crate bled sea-swelled Bibles. Every book, every piece of paper in that place was salt-damp, soft and swollen, almost unreadable.
Kay stood in the doorway while the women showed Mr. Brimner over his house—two plaster rooms, with a small roof out back over a cooking place. A dirt floor, but the sandy dirt was well packed down. The first room held a table and a chair, and the women were evidently very proud of them.
They opened the door to the other room, revealing a long bed, fit for a Tongan, with a long white net over it to cheat the mosquitoes. It was clean and pretty. This would be his place, for as long as the bishop said so. The wooden step outside the door was covered with slippers. The women had taken theirs off as they went in. Only Kay and Mr. Brimner still wore their boots.
They all went back out to the schoolhouse, where more women and men had gathered, bringing food. Always food when somebody visited, in this place. Children kept appearing round the corner of the house or climbing the low stone fence, interested, and trim in worn, well-laundered white shorts or dresses. Ten or fifteen of them, and a trickle more. With ceremony, the gift mat was pinned to the schoolroom wall.
There would be some difficulty, living in a place where nobody spoke your language and you did not yet speak theirs.
Mr. Brimner gave a short speech anyway, mounting the one step to the long porch of the school building. “Mālō e lelei, mālō aupito,” he said (they laughed with pleasure at this brave attempt). “I am sorry not to speak your language yet. I am told there is a man in another village—Fakakakai, or perhaps in Pukotala?—who speaks English, having lived in New Zealand. But we will not rely on him. I have my Tongan dictionary and am eager to learn. I am fortunate to have come home to this place, mālō, mālō aupito.”
The little crowd clapped their hands, although they could not have understood him very well, and then they ate, and drifted away into the fields again about their usual business. Each person a person as much as Kay was, as much as Mr. Brimner was. Each one thinking his own thoughts or singing an unknown song inside her head. Maybe, in the two years he spent there, Mr. Brimner would come to know what the people were thinking, maybe he would find someone else to teach Ancient Greek to, or to teach him Ancient Tongan.
The sailors brought Mr. Brimner’s trunks up to the house. The last mothers shooed the children out and helped unpack; even though each item must be exclaimed over, it was quickly done. The women looked at the neat house with satisfaction and left them alone.
Mr Brimner hung his plain silver-and-ebony crucifix on a nail on the wall, and set four or five books, including Meditation and Mental Prayer, on the table.
“I will keep most of the books stored away until I need them,” he told Kay. “Having seen the damp-damage at the school.”
The house door hung a little awry, but he shut it carefully behind them anyway and latched it with the rotating piece of wood, and walked with Kay down to the little stone jetty. The boat had gone back to the ship to take back the sailors, so they stood there, silent, alone together in this odd place. Ha‘ano.
Well. Arranging her pinny behind her so as not to muss her dress, Kay sat on the edge of the jetty, little stones pressing into her legs and rump. She would have pebbled dimples on the back of her legs from the rough concrete.
“Keep up your derivations list,” he said absently, scanning the variations in colour in the shallow sea.
“Yes,” she agreed.
“This is a pleasant haven where I find myself,” he said. He turned to look back at his house, and the other houses laid out along the interior road, and the forest of palms that reached almost to the ocean, along a thin edge of sanded beach. “It will only be lonely at first.”
The boat was crawling across already from the Morning Light. Kay stood and fluffed her dress around her again. “I will write to you,” she said. “I promise I will.”
The boat bumped up against the jetty. Mr. Best was waiting. She held out her hand, and Mr. Brimner took it gently and shook it with grave attention. He doffed his hat.
In the boat she sat facing the shore so she could wave to him again. His long, thin legs, his round body, his large head and smoked spectacles. He stood on the stone wharf, waving his handkerchief. Then, so that she could leave, he turned and wandered off down the beach, pale-grey jacket flapping a little behind him.